Hypothetical situation; JJ Abrams' ST trilogy has ended. The plan is to go ahead with the new timeline, but only a few cast members agree to return. You're in charge, what do you do?

Click to expand...

You recast them and just carry on making films.

Click to expand...

This. I'm tired of the constant reboots. Why did Spider-Man, for example, need rebooted again? Sure, it's a different actor. Big deal. Same holds for post-Nolan Batman. We don't need to retell Batman's origin yet again, just because we get new actors. They didn't reboot Bond each time we got a new actor.

Good grief, we all know the origins. We don't need to go back to "Issue 0" every other year.

I'd personally like to see Bad Robot produced SPOCK movie starring Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldana or a CAPTAIN KIRK movie starring Chris Pine with Karl Urban as his cantankerous sidekick. This is the first time we've had a group of Trek actors who can -and have- headlined their own films and I'd love it if they capitalized on that to build the Trek brand and further develop the characters.

But that needless Spider-Man reboot made absurd amounts of money, one of the top money makers for the year, which just goes to show, the rationale behind it doesn't matter. What matters is color, action, fantasy.

Star Trek has that in spades, so you could reboot it again or just accept that the brand has been re-established beyond the need for any particular character (it's called Star Trek, not James T. Kirk) and use whatever characters make sense going forward.

A TV series starring one of the movie actors could work if split between streaming and CBS. Quinto does TV, so does Cho. What about Urban?

As per usual, you guys are quibbling over stuff nobody at Paramount or CBS would bother with for ten seconds - what is "pure" Trek, continuity, which reality anything is taking place in, or even realizing there's more than one reality to begin with.

Instead, the people in control see Star Trek as a product, which is easier or harder to turn into cold, hard cash than other products at their disposal that they could spend money and effort on instead. Star Trek the product has been shown to be a good product in the movie business, but not in the TV business (which for simplicity's sake I'll use to refer to streaming).

Imagine you work for CBS. Would you bother with Star Trek? Why? In what form? How can you convince your boss it's a better bet than yet another iteration of CSI?

For starters, I'll add a crucial factor I neglected before, that it helps a lot to have some high-profile industry person pushing for it. Abrams pushed for Star Trek for movies and we got movies. If Roberto Orci pushes for Star Trek for TV, we may get TV. But the likes of JMS or even Ron Moore are unlikely to be as influential since they are not associated with stunning recent success in the franchise. You know the mantra: What have you done for me lately?

I see the current movie incaration of Star Trek running it's course very soon, especially with JJ and Company moving on to the Star Wars Uni - there's a whole lot more money to be made there.
As for Star Trek, I see it getting much smaller again. I think the fan generated projects will continue and become closer to mainstream, and I think (and hope) to see CGI films, either features, direct to homevideo, or TV.
Wouldn't it be interesting to do rotating schedule of (probably) made for TV CGI films featuring each of the crews - maybe one a month, or one per quarter? Then everyone could enjoy as much or as little of Star Trek as they wished. Ah well, probably not financially viable anyway.

Either a reboot of Kirk, Spock and the others or recasting parts as necessary to continue with the current version.

There's no real reason to assume that they'll ever bring back TNG or the TNG era as such in the movies. They can stay in the 23rd century forever - just as they managed to generate many hundreds of hours of television set in the 24th century.

Realistically and in common sense terms there's no reason that Paramount's execs should ever want to turn Star Trek over to a "traditionalist" again. Having once successfully escaped that trap, why climb back into the net?

But in all honesty, Trek fandom is contrarian by nature and therefore anything that is not the current Trek is therefore Pure Trek. Abrams Trek cannot be considered Pure until after it is done and another incarnation of Trek is being made. Just like Enterprise did not become Pure until Trek XI's release.